Isn’t it funny how just a taste, smell, or song can bring back a flood of precious memories that somehow you hadn’t thought about in years.

Spearmint mouthwash reminded me of being six years old again. My twin sister, my cousin and I would act like the three spare bedrooms in my Grandma’s house were our apartments where we lived on our own.

My cousin was a spy, my sister was an accountant, and I was teacher. We would come home from “work” and promptly check our mailbox. (We actually had a little red play-mailbox with a flimsy yellow flag.) It didn’t matter that I couldn’t read or write more than my name and “I saw the dog run”, we would just tell each other what the scribbles meant.

After we read our mail, we would go over to my cousin’s “apartment” and she would make us Spearmint Gum Tea. We didn’t have any of those little girl tea cups, so we just used some of our Grandma’s little glasses that always felt like they had been washed in too hot of water. The gum itself was too “spicy” for me and that’s why it became tea. One third of a stick of Extra Spearmint Gum mixed with water was perfect. We laughed and giggled because we could and that’s what little girls do.

We would finish our “tea” and go back to our “apartments” and go to “sleep”. Then a few minutes later and one of us would cock-a-doodle-doo like a roster and we would “wake up” and “go to work”.

We would play this game of “life” until Grandma would zip up the stairs in her pure white blouse and gold rimmed buttons and tell us that it was time for lunch: chicken noodle soup, peach slices with the skins off and Italian bread with Meijer brand raspberry jam.

I hadn’t thought about that in ages, but each tiny detail came back with just a little taste of spearmint mouthwash.